vicchi

OK, let’s start with some basic information to see what’s going on.

You can login to your WordPress install and the 500 error happens after login?

What version of WordPress and of the plugin are you using?

Did this happen after installation of the plugin or an upgrade?

Can you access the dashboard if you manually remove the plugin from the plugins directory?

I can’t think why this plugin would cause a 500 error but let’s see what I can do to help track this down. I’ve certainly never seen or heard of this sort of major error being caused by WP Biographia.

-Gary

If you’re able to share the theme I can have a look for you to see how easy (or not) it’d be to do what you want, on the assumption that you’d be happy to have the theme hacked around. Feel free to ping me by email … my contact details are all over at https://www.garygale.com/.

-Gary

In the current way in which the plugin works, WP Biographia appends the Biography Box to the tail (at least by default) of the post content and so it’ll appear whenever the theme’s template calls the the_content() WordPress API function.

In most templates, the code to output the post tags and the comments appear after the post content has been output.

It may be possible in a future version of the plugin to change the way in which the plugin outputs the Biography Box, but for now that’d need quite a bit of work. I’m not saying it won’t happen but I’d need to go away and do some homework and see what would need to be done to do this, if indeed it’s even possible.

Even the wp-biographia short-code isn’t a workaround as that only affects the post content (as far as I know).

You could edit your theme to call the wp_biographia_display function directly from the theme’s template but it’s a dirty hack and I haven’t even tested whether this is possible or not. My gut feel says it should be, but that’s no substitute for actually testing it out!

So the short answer to your question is, sadly, no, there’s no easy way.

On the positive side, I’m glad that v2.1.1 fixed your problem!

-Gary

Hi Dave and Carlotta,

Oh, I am a total and utter idiot. I broke my own rule of software deployment and tested and pushed v2.1 from my debug environment and not from my production environment. I hang my head in shame.

So what happened was that wp-biographia-admin.php had a single line of debugging code left in, which worked fine in my debug environment as the debugging plugin was still installed and active. This plugin is not in my production environment and if I’d tested in this environment I would have spotted this problem.

So I’ve removed this from the code, re-tested (in the production environment), and pushed v2.1.1 to SVN and it’s up in the repository for download round about now … this should fix the problem.

I will write myself a plugin release checklist and make sure I stick to it in future. The only saving grace is that this lesson has given me an idea for a blog post on the perils of plugin development. Not that it helps you in wasted time on this; for that I can only apologise and thank you for your patience.

I’ve just pushed v2.1 of WP Biographia to the WordPress SVN repository. It should be showing up as an update in the Plugins Dashboard page soon.

Hi Carlotta and Dave,

You’ll be pleased to know (at least I hope you’ll be pleased) that v2.1 of WP Biographia will have the ability to suppress the display of the Biography Box for individual users on posts, on pages or on both posts and pages. This can be done from a suitably permissioned user’s profile as well as centrally from the plugin’s settings page.

Actually, the code is already written and running on my local test system and a beta of v2.1 will be up on GitHub later today at https://vicchi.github.com/wp-biographia/.

The code still needs a little bit of CSS and jQuery tweaking to make it hang together but the functionality is all there and it seems to work with every test case I’ve thrown at it.

I still need to update the readme and screenshots as well as ensuring that nothing break during the upgrade process but I hope to have the new version ready to release by the end of this week, assuming there’s no hidden gotchas that I haven’t found yet.

Once the beta of v2.1 is up on GitHub, feel free to download and play with it, as long as you’re happy with living life on the bleeding edge and you’re comfortable with installing plugins manually. If not, then just hold fire for a few days more and v2.1 should be up on the official WordPress plugin repository for automatic update.

Thanks for your interest, feedback and support; I really appreciate it. A lot.

-Gary

It’s also worth checking for browser errors in Firefox using Firebug, or Safari’s developer mode as well as checking your web server error log and enabling PHP error logging (if your web host allows this).

Two others things …

1) It’s always worth reverting to a stock theme, such as Twenty Ten, to make sure that there’s no oddness in the theme or in the theme’s functions.php. Just as plugins don’t always play well together so it is with themes.

2) If you want to take this discussion offline, feel free to drop me an email instead to gary [at] vicchi [dot] org.

I’m running WP v3.3 as well as WP Biographia v2.0 on several of my blogs and I haven’t seen this.

OK … a couple of obvious questions first?

• Have you tried emptying your browser cache and reloading the page?
• Have you tried disabling all plugins, including WP Biographia, to see if this occurs?
• Have you tried selectively re-enabling plugins to see when this occurs?

I can’t think off of the top of my head how WP Biographia might be the cause; the interaction with the Dashboard is kept to plugin’s settings page; there’s no actions and/or filters that I know of that would interfere with the WYSIWG editor …

Hi Carlotta,

Thanks for the great feedback! Unfortunately at the moment it’s not possible to exclude certain users from displaying the Biography Box on their posts. I’ll certainly take a look at this for a future version though.

-Gary

OK. Please keep me posted on what you find out as I’d like to see this through to the end. In the meantime I’ll flag this as resolved and it can be re-opened if there’s progress.

Hmm … not as straightforward as I’d hoped. While I want to get this fixed, I’m not sure I’m up to shelling out nearly ￡40.00 to test this out, as I hope you can understand. Maybe a way forward would be for me to “borrow” the theme from you and try to duplicate your problem locally, without exposing the borrowed theme on a public facing web server?

Can you possibly either post the URLs of the theme (assuming it’s freely available) or drop me a mail with them. I’d like to try this out on my local install and see what the issue is on this if at all possible.

Houston we don’t have a problem. Thankfully. v2.0 is reinstated now. See this thread for the full story

Phew. It’s just gone midnight here in the UK and I can now slope off to bed without the need to burn the midnight oil trying to track a bug down and fix it. I’ve learnt a lot about plugins over the last few months and the upgrade of the configuration settings is one thing I need to make sure goes into v2.0.1 of WP Biographia.

Thanks for the really quick replies to this; it’s really much appreciated that you took the time to get back to me rather than thinking “meh” and deleting the plugin!